Words by Patrick Swift

Mr. Mitch is in a good place with his music right now. A few days before Composer chatted with him, he tweeted: “…I’ve just clocked I’ve reached the stage where I can put out music in any genre and you guys will be open to listening to it. Do you know how long that took? I am grateful AF!”

Starting out making grime instrumentals for MCs like Skepta, Trim and Riko Dan, his music now couldn’t be further from grime (although it’s an influence that will never go away completely) as he carves out his own left-field niche that has seen him release on Planet Mu in the past as well as the inception of his own Gobstopper Records. Then there’s Mitch’s creation of what he calls “Techno Dancehall”, a mutant melting pot of techno and the Jamaican music that comes via his heritage.

This path is resonating. Around the time Composer was talking to Mr. Mitch, complimentary articles on Bandcamp and Trench popped up within the space of a few days of each other. We spoke to him to learn more about his processes and what gives him his unique sound.

How did you get into producing?

I got into producing quite young, when I was about 12 years old. My cousin had Fruity Loops, and he was making full tracks properly, making completely original stuff that just blew my mind. So I think I was about 13, managed to get a copy of Fruity Loops and that’s where it all started, just making original music from there.

What DAW are you using nowadays?

I use Logic, I’ve used it for about 10 years. Before that, I was using Fruity Loops and Reason but my PC died, and then I went to university and got a Mac. Since then I’ve lost touch with all of the PC-based software. Fruity Loops wasn’t available on Apple at the time either.

Not to dwell on it too much because as you’ve said you don’t really make grime anymore, but how did you end up working with MCs like P Money?

Initially I had two tracks on different Trim mixtapes and then I had a track that was used on a Riko Dan mixtape. That was when they were mostly putting out CDs and it might go on iTunes, but some of it doesn’t live on Apple Music or streaming sites so it’s kind of lost. They came about through connections with DJs, I’d send my tracks to DJs to play and they might send them to artists or someone might hear it and get in touch. I got on the Skepta album ‘Doin’ It Again’ in 2011, and that came about from him putting out an acapella for one if his songs, ‘Bad Boy’, on Twitter and I did a remix and tweeted it back to him. He contacted me and said he wanted me to be on his album, which was crazy at the time because I wasn’t anybody who was in the scene or anything like that, he just liked the remix and wanted to work with me. We made something completely new for his album, which was great.

P Money is another one where he contacted me through Twitter, I don’t know…I’m always baffled by where these MCs are hearing my music really, because not a lot of grime DJs were playing my music back then. Even now, my stuff has always been a bit more left-field so the traditional grime DJ wasn’t necessarily playing it, it was only a few DJs who were. It’s nice that they saw something and came to me.

Listening to your latest release Patrimony which has a lot of percussive elements, is the approach different there?

Some of those tracks were originally started on my Elektron Digitakt sampler, so I think that helps for me to make more drum-focused music. Working on a piece of hardware that I can just program drums like that, it makes me focus on rhythm, which is what that EP is all about.

One some of your music, you’ve mastered and mixed it but on other releases you’ve got other people to master it - is that a conscious choice?

With mastering, I usually try to get someone else to do it. It’s not my area of expertise, almost everything I know about mastering I’ve learnt from YouTube tutorials. For Patrimony, I wanted to keep costs down because it was a Bandcamp Day release, I wanted to try and maximise profit. But I spent a long time on those masters and I feel like they sound good so I was happy with it. In general I mix everything myself, sometimes there’s a couple of releases where I’ve had help, I feel like I’m constantly learning with that. A lot of the mixing stuff I do is more creative mixing, I don’t necessarily want it to sound as clean as a mixing engineer might make it, but obviously if you work with the right engineer they’ll understand your vision.

Is there any software/hardware in particular that you use when making tracks?

I use my Prophet synth on tracks, not too often, but it’s got a nice feel to it. You’ll probably notice the tracks I’ve made on the Prophet, there’s one called ‘Phantom Prophet’ and ‘Phantom Dance’ as well. Both of those names, the majority of sounds there are from the Prophet. ‘Phantom Prophet’ was called that because originally I kept forgetting the name of the synth and was calling it a phantom instead. I like the Native Instruments Maschine Jam, for the same reason that I used to like Fruity Loops. It’s nice for getting drum patterns down quickly, it changed my workflow when I got that. Everything else is pretty much in the box. I love the Soundtoys plugins, the Waves Audio stuff and then a few FabFilter things. A lot of my sounds come from Omnisphere, but then I put them through different effects processes to change their sound. I’m a fan of getting basic sounds and then putting them through a lot of different effects.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the Maschine Jam, it doesn’t seem to get talked about that much.

It’s fun to use, I don’t know how they intended it to be used really. Native Instruments gifted it to me, and they wanted me to say how I was using it. I asked them how they intended it to be used, and they said however you want to use it. To me at the time it looked like something that was similar to the Ableton Push layout, but I don’t use Ableton so I wouldn’t understand. I’ve just been using it as a step sequencer.

It seems like people are really connecting with your whole 'Techno Dancehall' thing, can you tell us more about it?

'Techno Dancehall' for me stems from my mix series. Well, I call it a mix series, there’s only been two, but it’s me hearing a trend in rhythms that different producers around the world have been experimenting with. To me, it had the spirit of techno and the rhythms of dancehall, and I just decided to compile a mix from it. It seems to have been well received, and I think it was maybe the first time someone had put these emerging sounds into a focused mix and given it a name.

I’m not trying to give it a genre name because all the artists involved are from different scenes and making their own individual sounds, but there’s something that links it all for me. I guess that’s the rhythm and the feel of the dancehall sound, and the Jamaican rhythms. That’s my heritage, my dad used to play rhythm guitar for a lovers rock group that he had. He also used to play with Ariwa Sound System as a session musician and tour around Europe. Reggae was always in my home as a child, even though I rebelled against it as a teenager.